NAS Blog

If you are a double major in Classical Languages and English Literature at the University of Wyoming, you are saddled with a required diversity class on “literature by and about women, not men.”  The course that Marine Lance Corporal Aaron Graham wants to transfer, my Literature By and About Men class, thus does not meet the Cowboys’ standards for diversity.  Remarkably, Wyoming describes itself as a “welcoming community.”  Welcome, Lance Corporal, to institutionalized sexism in academia where men cannot be studied, only opposed; men cannot be analyzed, only condemned; men cannot be understood, only mocked and despised.

Wyoming is no maverick.  I had a fight just getting my course approved.  The University of California bridled at accepting a course about men and uniquely male experience.  That’s understandable because anyone raised on Family Guy, The Simpsons, American Dad, beer commercials, sitcoms, gender feminism, and the glut of misandristic Hollywood films (misandristic appears not even to be a word in most dictionaries) naturally thinks that males must be roped, tied, and broken of their stupid, pathetic, and predatory ways.

Aaron, however, read serious literature by David Lloyd, Faulkner, Sam Shepard (“The Real Gabby Hayes”), Amy Clampitt, Philip Larkin, Christina Hoff Summers, Hemingway, Camille Paglia, Harry Crews, Steven Pinker, Homer, Harvey Mansfield, Isaac Clemens, Leonard Gardner, Thomas van Nortwick, Robert Hayden, James Dickey, Leonard Sax, Vergil, Harvey Swados, Tennyson, Joan Didion (“John Wayne:  A Love Song”), et al.  Aaron viewed Seven Samurai, Ghost Dog, Deliverance, Fight Club, and “I am the Lord thy God . . .” from Decalogue. Aaron studied lessons about “Boys,” “Fathers,” “Sons,” “Men and War,” “Male Codes,” “The Man of Letters,” “Love and Marriage,” and “Manly Aging, Manly Death.”

Too bad, pardner!  Those readings, those films, those topics are not worthy of study at the University of Wyoming because Wyoming has an agenda:   “. . . women, not men.”  This is not welcoming, not inclusive, and not education; it’s galloping gender discrimination.

The same day I heard of Aaron’s dilemma, I also heard of a new academic direction for men:  male studies.  As one of my gender feminist colleagues frequently asserts:  “Equity must be addressed!”  How right she is.  Cowboy up, Wyoming—time to plant this locoweed up on Boot Hill.

In today’s Pope Center article, Jane Shaw reviews the rather long list of scandals at UNC institutions in recent years.

Are other states better? Or worse?

The City University of New York still lacks a free institutions program, and Professor Thomas J. Main of Baruch College is aiming to close the gap. 15 months ago Main came within a hair’s breadth of finding funding, but the ’08 stock market collapse crushed the grant. Now, another foundation has offered Main some seed capital, and he has requested course proposals from about ten faculty around CUNY.  Among the courses being proposed are “Institutions and Economic Growth”, “Liberty and Equality in American Constitutionalism”, and “Federalism in American Government”.  Let us root for Professor Main’s success in this worthy undertaking.

Cross posted from NAS.org

From time to time we cite without comment various items from articles, books, websites, and other sources. We don’t comment on these items (at least in words), but our readers may have something to add. Today’s No Comment item is a newspaper clipping from 1962, entitled “Social Role of the University Discussed.“ The newspaper is a publication of Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada, and it refers to St. Dunstan’s University, a Roman Catholic institution which closed its campus in 1967.

Excerpts:

What is the university’s fundamental social obligation? The university’s obligation, he said, is to see that the individual has the opportunity to develop himself by providing a suitable climate for academic freedom which entacts the ability to choose what is good between alternatives.

[...]

The university, he said, has the obligation to set high academic standards and it does not have the obligation to educate all men of society. The fact that knowledge has increased in an unprecedented way requires excellence from its students and teachers, and a lowering of standards to educate all men is but a Marxist Utopian attitude.

NBC: Yale President Responds to T-Shirt Controversy

“I think of all Harvard men as sissies” from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s book This Side of Paradise (which I’m currently reading) was deemed offensive to homosexuals. Also check out FIRE’s coverage of this case.

Chronicle of Higher Ed: Yale, the (High School) Musical

Yale redeems itself with an awesome (albeit long) admissions video.

Slate: The Opening of the Academic Mind (via Minding the Campus)

A book review of Louis Menand’s The Marketplace of Ideas. “Professors, the people most visibly responsible for the creation of new ideas, have, over the last century, become all too consummate professionals,  initiates in a system committed to its own protection and perpetuation.”

Joanne Jacobs: More Students Refuse to State a Race

“‘We shouldn’t be judged by our race,’ said senior Jessica Mae Belcher, 17, whose roots are African and Cherokee. She prefers ‘none of the above’ because ‘we’re all different, but we’re all the same, too.’” See also McClatchy:

Doug Craig, who’s been principal at Laguna Creek for 10 years, appreciates the students’ desire to be judged on their merits, not their race.

“I’d love to look at individual kids and leave it at that, but we wouldn’t even know there was an achievement gap if we didn’t measure our kids,” he said. “There must be a systemic reason and we need to figure out what causes it and how to fix it.”

Stanford Review: The Man-Made Myth

“Email and poster bombardments encouraging students to live sustainably (with the goal of cutting CO2 emissions) are based on flawed reasoning. [...] We have grown up in a society in which the myth of man-made global warming is so thoroughly pervasive, doubt is heretical. But science proves human carbon dioxide emissions are not responsible for global warming.”

Stanford Review: ES 10 Students Take on Climate Change Skeptics (via Campus Reform)

“While much of the layman world still debates the reality of human-induced global warming, the scientific community treats it as unquestionable fact. And, like scientists, says Head TA Jess McNally, in ES10 ‘We don’t debate climate change; it is just something we teach.’”

“ES10 is environmental ed, and so, it should result in a change of behaviors.”

New York Times: Professor is a Label That Leans Left

College professors are liberal because of typecasting – the same reason why nurses are women and cops are conservative.

Chronicle of Higher Ed: The Poetry is in the Proof

Why liberal arts students should learn mathematical proofs.

Minding the Campus: What is the AAUP Up To?

A review of Cary Nelson’s No University is an Island. “Nelson’s position on teaching social justice points to a related problem. He provides a ringing defense of academic freedom, but is reticent to discuss the legitimate limits to this freedom.”

In this week’s Pope Center Clarion Call, I review the new book by Rutgers sociology professor Jackson Toby, The Lowering of Higher Education in America.

Toby makes much the same case I have — we’ve badly oversold higher education by making it easy (and seemingly imperative) for just about anyone who graduates from high school to go to college. The change he advocates is to make the federal college loan system meritocratic. Instead of blindly promoting “access,” we should make eligibility for federal loans depend on demonstrated academic ability. I think that’s at least a step in the right direction. I’d like to see the feds get out of education entirely and the arguments Professor Toby makes will help that cause. He also says a lot of “the emperor is wearing no clothes” kinds of things about higher education that need to be said.

NAS’s Glenn Ricketts traces the history of the sustainability movement, now dominant as a campus ideology, in a major article that will appear in a forthcoming sustainability-themed issue of our journal Academic Questions. His piece examines the roots of the movement, from the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring to Murray Bookchin’s theories of “social ecology” to the emergence of urban atheists’ religion of choice to an “interconnected” web of political and spiritual ideology.

This important article gives historical context for an idea that has gripped America’s colleges and universities. If you’ve ever heard about or been affected by sustainability mania and wondered, “How did we get here?” this essay is an excellent reference point.

Having just returned from a Foresight Institute conference on “The Synergy of Molecular Manufacturing and AGI,” I am struck by the educational implications of what I heard about transformative science and technology.

One speaker, Stanford forecaster Paul Saffo, proposed a metaphor:  “Engineers and Druids.”  He senses that public attitudes about science are hardening and becoming as polarized as Red state-Blue state politics.  “Engineers,” he explained, are optimists, expecting technological solutions to life’s problems.  “Druids” are pessimists, seeking a return to pre-technological existence.  Both types, I think, are Utopians:  the engineers beavering away on their techno-nirvana while the druids are yearning for a farmer’s-market Eden.

The Saffo Split is most obvious in academia with the engineers night-owling in the labs and the druids moping around humanities lecture halls.  Druids hiss at engineers because there is little venture capital available for their composting research; engineers simply ignore druids as irrelevant.  But Saffo’s real worry is not the extremes; it’s the polarization that has left no moderates who know both some science and some poetry.

So why is there no middle?  With AGI and synthetic biology rewriting the definition of “human” itself, why aren’t druids more interested in the probable techno future?  For one thing, where would they have learned about it?  The number of futures studies programs on American campuses can be counted on one hand.  Elsewhere, Taiwan’s Tamkang University requires students to fulfill a futures requirement in order to graduate.  A typical Tamkang exercise is to articulate what futures are possible, what future is most desirable, and what future is most likely.  In Silicon Valley, Singularity University does something similar in nine weeks but only for 40 hand-picked entrepreneurial types who can drop 25 large.

The absence of a moderate middle produces two armed camps and what Saffo calls a “foresight deficit,” a systemic societal inability to look ahead, anticipate, and shape policy.  Solid education about what the engineers are doing is needed to rebuild an influential middle that can moderate the extremes.  All schools should produce graduates like Tamkang’s who have learned “how to recognize the future, adjust to its changing nature, and create the future.”

I was pleased to read this posting in The Lawyerist, entitled Teaching Makes You a Better Lawyer.  This is so true, in my opinion, but it’s self-serving when coming from the academy.  Coming from the Bar it’s most welcome.  I think the disdain that so many lawprofs (typically on the left) have for the Bar is often the product of a psychological self-loathing by people who can neither teach nor do.

In yesterday’s Pope Center piece, Jay Schalin takes a look at programs in the UNC system that aim at taking the weakest of the incoming students and giving them remedial work in basic math and English, as well as social skills, in hopes of increasing their graduation rates. These programs appear to do little good. Jay concludes, “The universities are not the place to re-teach high school subjects and to teach basic social skills.”

I think the assumption lurking behind such programs, that it’s necessarily a good thing to increase the graduation rates of marginal students, needs to be examined. Since we know that large numbers of these kids, even if they graduate, wind up in “high school jobs” anyway, is it really a good use of time and money to keep them in school for four, five, six years?